Search result for: politics-of-culture-other-essays

"This work brings together Scruton's best essays from many sources, arranging them thematically. The book has four sections: Language and Art, Writers in Context, Architecture, and Culture and Anarchy. Though the essays are diverse, certain themes are developed in particular and then in general ways, and there are several important essays on writers and critics, that contribute to the reappraisal of their work - among them Dante, Andre Breton, Graham Greene, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, Jacques Lacan,and Yukio Mishima"

Some of the 11 essays are new and other previously published. Though written independently, Berube (education, Old Dominion U., Norfolk, Virginia) finds that they establish a common theme of the complex relationship of intellect to schooling to culture. Among his topics are the socially conscious un

These essays cover topics as radically diverse as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Václav Havel, The Magic Flute and Viz magazine. All have been published before, and many have already proved controversial. The author, a leading Oakeshott scholar, contributes frequently to the TLS . Witty, moving and erudite, his prose is also conspicuously graceful and clear. This collection is addressed as much to the educated general reader as to the academic specialist. It includes an otherwise almost unobtainable exchange with Sir Isaiah Berlin.

In ANOTHER WAY OF SEEING, Peter Gabel argues that our most fundamental spiritual need as human beings is the desire for authentic mutual recognition. Because we live in a world in which this desire is systematically denied due to the legacy of fear of the other that has been passed on from generation to generation, we exist as what he calls "withdrawn selves," perceiving the other as a threat rather than as the source of our completion as social beings. Calling for a new kind of "spiritual activism" that speaks to this universal interpersonal longing, Gabel shows how we can transform law, politics, public policy, and culture so as to build a new social movement through which we become more fully present to each other--creating a new "parallel universe" existing alongside our socially separated world and reaffirming the social bond that inherently unites us. "Peter Gabel is one of the grand prophetic voices in our day. He also is a long-distance runner in the struggle for justice. Don't miss this book!" --Cornel West, The Class of 1943 Professor, Princeton University, and Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary "Replete with wise insights that reward readers with Another Way of Seeing toward their pursuit of compassion, community, and a better world, law professor, activist and philosopher Peter Gabel's excellent essay collection elaborates upon the meaning of Martin Luther King Jr.'s expression 'Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.' No matter what your expertise, Gabel's thoughts are pertinent to fulfillment of your human possibilities." --Ralph Nader, Washington, DC

In recent years the study of British art, especially of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been transformed. This has been the result of a general awareness of the theoretical issues involved in the study of culture and society, and the new emphasis given to the questions of class, race, and gender, which has produced a new, interdisciplinary approach to the study of British art. The essays in this book, all previously unpublished, are written by scholars from various disciplines, many of whom have been at the forefront of this transformation. There are essays on Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby, Turner and Benjamin Robert Haydon; on the teaching of art to women, on eighteenth-century social theories of painting, and on the representation of industrial landscape, of femininity, and of "exotic" and oriental cultures. The result is a book which will be of equal interest to scholars and students of the history of art, literature, social history, cultural studies, and women's studies.

A collection of provocative essays on politics, social meaning, and law from Critical Legal Studies scholar and magazine columnist Peter Gabel, The Bank Teller presents a unique and powerful analysis of the psychological and spiritual dimension of U.S. political culture and society. In this series of strikingly original essays, Gabel sheds new light on a wide range of subjects based on what he calls “the longing for mutual recognition,” including the meaning of American politics from 1960, health care, affirmative action, the SAT (abolish it!, Gabel declares), deadly job culture, and the spiritual dimension of public policy. He takes on the adversarial roles of the legal system, including a nationally publicized debate with Alan Dershowitz on the moral obligation of criminal defense lawyers, as well as the meaning of the Holocaust and the social psychology underlying the modern media. Passionate, insightful and profound, The Bank Teller fundamentally challenges our existing social institutions and presents a political strategy that invents new forms of working, friendship, and community. It was well reviewed and much discussed -- and in some quarters much disputed -- upon its print release in 2000, and has since been assigned to classes on politics, law, and religion.

A new collection of essays by the T. S. Eliot Award-winning writer features some of his top writings and explores such themes as security, freedom, and community, in a volume that includes the pieces "The Way of Ignorance," "The Purpose of a Coherent Community," and "Compromise, Hell!" Reprint.

Herman Gray takes a sweeping look at black popular culture over the past decade to explore culture's role in the push for black political power and social recognition. In a series of linked essays, he finds that black artists, scholars, musicians, and others have been instrumental in reconfiguring social and cultural life in the United States and he provocatively asks how black culture can now move beyond a preoccupation with inclusion and representation. Gray considers how Wynton Marsalis and his creation of a jazz canon at Lincoln Center acted to establish cultural visibility and legitimacy for jazz. Other essays address such topics as the work of the controversial artist Kara Walker; the relentless struggles for representation on network television when those networks are no longer the primary site of black or any other identity; and how black musicians such as Steve Coleman and George Lewis are using new technology to shape and extend black musical traditions and cultural identities.

James Q. Wilson is one of America's preeminent public policy scholars. For decades, he has analyzed the changing political and cultural landscape with clarity and honesty, bringing his wisdom to bear on all facets of American government and society. This is a collection of fifteen of Wilson's most insightful essays-drawing on thirty years of his observations on religion, crime, the media, terrorism and extremism, and the old-fashioned notion of 'character.' Readers of every political persuasion will come away from this volume with a new understanding of how American politics and culture have evolved over the last half-century. These essays are not 'the grumpy words of a conservative who can't be reconciled to the realities of contemporary American life,' Wilson writes. Rather, they are straight talk from a painstaking empiricist and consummate social scientist who believes in American exceptionalism. American Politics, Then & Now is a compelling portrait of a beloved nation.

In Compassion, ten scholars draw on literature, psychoanalysis, and social history to provide an archive of cases and genealogies of compassion. Together these essays demonstrate how "being compassionate" is shaped by historical specificity and social training, and how the idea of compassion takes place in scenes that are anxious, volatile, surprising, and even contradictory.

Herbert Read was a maverick character in the cultural life of the twentieth century. A radical leader of the avant garde in the 1930s, and an anarchist revolutionary during the war years, by the time of his death in 1968 he had become a key figure at the heart of the British cultural establishment. To Hell with Culture offers readers an ideal overview of the ideas that marked out this seminal and hugely influential thinker. It is a controversial work that engages the reader in a wide range of topics, from revolutionary art to pornography. Adept at challenging assumptions and penetrating to the heart of any issue, Read's deft prose encourages the reader to think critically, to question and to subvert the voice of authority, of whatever political or cultural creed. Only through such a critical evaluation of culture, Read believes, can one appreciate the art that arises from the 'unpolitical manifestation of the human spirit'. At a time when authority and value are questionable terms, and when culture itself is a contested concept, Read's is both a challenging and an enlightening voice.

This collection of essays is eclectic, covering certain political, ethical, cultural, and philosophical topics. But running through all the material is the evolutionary-naturalistic perspective stated in the opening essay, which gives the book its title. Another emphatic feature is a focus on the Western cultural outlook, as the context in which the large number of topics is viewed. This focus is important as a way of re-affirming the distinctive character of Western intellectual and cultural history, at a time when that character is, arguably, not sufficiently recognised and appreciated. Authors referred to include Aristotle, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Sartre.

This book is a series of essays in the area of current culture and its defects, Christian religious belief and other political and philosophical issues. Issues of race, poverty, gender among others are all considered in the book.

In his latest book, Patrick Brantlinger probes the state of contemporary America. Brantlinger takes aim at neoliberal economists, the Tea Party movement, gun culture, immigration, waste value, surplus people, the war on terror, technological determinism, and globalization. An invigorating return to classic cultural studies with its concern for social justice and challenges to economic orthodoxy, States of Emergency is a delightful mix of journalism, satire, and theory that addresses many of the most pressing issues of our time.